Chapter 64 Mack
Mack
The sight of the envelope, still white and crisp despite having been smashed into the PO box, sent Mack’s heart racing.
He set Gulliver down on the hot tiles and tugged away at their first real piece of mail in at least a year.
He yanked the slim package from its too-tight surroundings, shredding both sides in the process.
There was no return address on the back, and Mack’s hands shook as he flipped it over.
The sight of their innocuous, anonymous address carefully spelled out in familiar handwriting washed over his body like a wave.
The looping, orderly scroll belonged unmistakably to Pammy Byers, and Mack began to breathe again.
They had been expecting this; he should have known.
He had been on the furtive phone calls, had agreed with Hailey to compromise their secret (carefully!) for the sake of her parents’ sanity.
In his hands, Mack was holding one end of the thinnest of threads that connected the two of them to their old lives.
He took a quick glance around the empty postal building, then slid his thumb along the end of the heavy envelope and tipped the contents out onto the dusty counter next to him.
There was a long note from Pammy that he didn’t read, and a couple of flat pieces of metal on a string—some kind of wind chime, by the looks of it.
There were three packets of grape Kool-Aid, which any interested customs guy would definitely have thought was poorly disguised cocaine.
Mack took another furtive look around before he turned his attention to the last of the Pammy Byers booty: a copy of Cleveland Social magazine.
The glossy cover photo of the brilliant autumn trees on Lake Erie’s southern edge filled him with a mixture of revulsion and nostalgia.
September was the Bratenahl Issue, and Mack couldn’t decide whether Pammy had sent it out of desperate hope, or utter madness.
The landscape was a world away from his current surroundings. Had he ever lived there, really?
He had tried it on, for sure. He had never wanted it like Hailey did, but still, he had accepted fresh towels from the Shoreby pool attendant and signed on to pay school bills higher than the GDP of a small country.
In the end, though, it was Bratenahl that didn’t want Mack.
It had chewed him up and spat him out, and that was okay.
He was fine with it, and now here he was in the tropics, with the warm sun on his back.
Right then he resolved for the millionth time to write that novel: he would be a Hemingway for the twenty-first century, one with a pen name, whose true identity would only be discovered upon his death, leaving a legacy for future generations who could come and visit the tiny apartment where he wrote his masterpiece .
. . More importantly, of course, Mack had his family around him, and they were all safe, and that’s what mattered.
From time to time he did wonder, though—especially right then as his eyes lingered on the ad for Cleveland Tech on the back cover of the magazine—from time to time he did think of his students, and what they had made of his daring escape. Whether they would have thought him foolish, or brave.
He hoped it was the latter.